THE STATE OF OUR UNIONS (SUPREME COURT, LABOR, UNIONS)

Given
the constraints of our two-party system and the differences between the parties
on workers' issues, it makes sense for unions to endorse Democrats and for
union members to pull the Democratic lever on election day. But for too long,
union leaders have tethered themselves to the Democratic Party on fundamental
questions of strategy. Ironically, when the Democrats take control of the White
House the problem is exacerbated, as unions often mistake access for power. The
leaders of the Democratic Party don't wake up in the morning thinking about how
to expand social benefits to workers or the poor. And they certainly don't wake
up and think about how to make unions stronger.

As
the consultant-industrial complex linked to the Democratic Party has taken over
at most national unions, unions have substituted "messaging" for
organizing while actual organizers have nearly become extinct. To beat the
twenty-four-hour nonstop lies blasted into American homes by Fox News requires
engaging workers face to face—not blasting them with poll-tested e-mails. It
takes a two-way discussion to help workers move past fear and frustration and
toward collective action to address the problems in their lives. Note to unions:
Twitter and Facebook are not engagement.

Rather
than focusing on the immediate economic security of the working class (and in
this highly unequal country, that means the middle class too), unions have been
preoccupied with their own organizational security. Encouraged by pollsters and
Democratic Party consultants, union leaders decided to bet the farm on the
Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). With the economic crisis ravaging the nation,
this was the number-one "ask" of the new administration labor had fought
so hard (and paid so dearly) to elect. Keep in mind that unions have been
trying unsuccessfully to win meaningful labor law reform since the 1940s—when
they were much stronger. The Chamber of Commerce and its unionbusting allies
were undoubtedly unhappy that Democrats were even discussing labor law reform,
but the big business lobby must have been delighted with a strategy hatched by
unions that the Chamber could boil down to "unions want to take away a
worker's right to vote by secret ballot on whether to form a union." Labor
leaders spent the first year of the Obama administration working "behind
the scenes" to enact this priority. Not surprisingly, they failed.

What
could unions have been doing, and what should they be doing, to change the
equation in 2012 and also in future union elections? Creating a real fight over
the state of the working and middle classes by picking up on issues where
unions can make an immediate difference in people's lives. The ability of
unions to expand their ranks doesn't lie in labor law reform; it lies in the
potential for Americans in large numbers to see unions as relevant. With just
over 7 percent of the private-sector workforce in unions, it's not hard to see
why union leaders are preoccupied with their very survival. But after seventy
years of unsuccessful attempts at technocratic legislative, legal and
regulatory approaches to expanding unions, there is no time like now to try
mass social movement unionism.

Workers
can't pay rent, pay the mortgage, get a credit card, find a job, buy clothes or
schoolbooks for their kids or retire. They face increased divorce rates as
family tensions rise, and they have lost their sense of dignity. They don't
care about labor law reform, and they don't care about unions (at least in their
current form). They are in despair, and unanswered despair quickly becomes
either fertilizer for the fear mongers or the reason to not bother showing up
at the polls. Either decision is a disaster likely to be repeated unless unions
reset, and fast.

Rather
than posting links to the websites of housing groups, how about starting direct
worker-to-worker conversations about occupying mortgage company headquarters
across the country until the banks stop foreclosing on their members' homes?
Rather than suddenly calling for members to picket banks or take seemingly
random militant actions, how about sitting down with union members and talking
about what actions everyone can take to force solutions to the housing
crisis—solutions such as making banks revalue mortgages to the actual value of
homes and creating lines of credit so workers can move to places where they
might find a job?

Unions
need to start connecting with workers face-to-face through house parties and
worksite and home visits to ask what's keeping them up at night. Then unions
should plan direct actions with workers that respond to the issues facing them.
How about taking over the offices of big credit-rating agencies and occupying
them 24/7 by the thousands until they agree to erase all the bad credit heaped
on anyone who has made a late mortgage payment because they lost their job or
their hours were cut back? The housing crisis ties directly to the wage crisis,
which ties directly to the jobs crisis. People in this country are screaming
for a fight, but the only people offering one have been from the right wing.
All these issues have been staring labor in the face for several years. Why
hasn't any union turned the crisis facing workers into a crisis for capital and
the political elite?

There
are two main reasons for this failure, and union members need to declare an
internal mini-MoveOn movement to confront them. First, to this day, when asked
about the housing crisis, many unions essentially say, "That's someone
else's problem. We only do workers' issues in the workplace." Given the
crises in all aspects of workers' lives, that response is even more backward
and shortsighted than the second reason unions have failed to do what they
should be doing: union turf wars. Some of the best organizers have been
teaching workers to fight one another instead of how to fight the bosses, let
alone how to mount collective action against the broader political elite.

It's
not too late. The housing crisis still looms large, and the coming attack on
Social Security and other entitlement programs will offer plenty of room for
unions to mobilize their base and organize the unorganized. But these efforts
should be oriented around something other than forming a union.

Union
organizers—paid staff and rank-and-file workers—should begin to take to the
doors and begin to meet hundreds of thousands of workers and galvanize a
movement to demand economic justice. If unions do this with unorganized workers
and together they win campaigns, it's more likely these same workers will consider
unionization to be a good option in their work life. With a ratio of one
organizer for 1,000 organizing conversations in neighborhoods nationwide, just
2,000 union organizers could engage 2 million people—and that's plenty to
create an untenable crisis that the elite will have to deal with.

Ironically,
the only organizational security issue that should be taken up urgently by the
labor movement has produced yet another circular firing squad: the carefully
constructed hate campaign against public-sector unions. The bruising attack
being waged on "government unions" from the heart of blue states like
New Jersey is a three-pronged jihad against everything the right hates most:
the idea of redistribution of any resources to the poor; African-Americans and
people of color, who are disproportionately represented in the government
workforce; and unions in general (the biggest unionized bloc of Americans work
for the government). You can bet this third goal is high on the butcher paper
covering the walls in conservative war rooms. Watching private-sector unions
abandon this fight and willingly serve up government unions for destruction
shows just how easy it is to divide and conquer. The longer we allow the right
to name the public sector as anything other than one essential component of the
economy, the longer we allow the right to dismantle the only real base of
unions and the only real source of good jobs left for many people of color and
women.

It's
time to empower people to get into motion. We know people learn best from
action—it's not rocket science or something we need a poll about. For years we
have known that the best issues are those that are widely and deeply felt and
that we can reasonably come up with solutions for. Unions would see that these
issues are staring them in the face if only they'd listen to workers instead of
pollsters.

Trade
union and the struggle for democracy in Nigeria

When
everything is said and done, democracy consists of a set of rights and the
processes as well as procedures that are in place for guaranteeing, protecting
and expanding those rights. There is agreement that the NLC has made enormous
contributions to the struggle for democracy in Nigeria (Alalade, 2004). These
contributions are marked in particular in the following areas:

Nigeria's
Sovereign Rights

All
the economic and political struggles of the NLC have been informed by a vision
of genuine national liberation for Nigeria. In all its documents and actions,
the Nigeria Labour Congress has consistently defended the sovereignty of the
country. It has done this in its positions on the various adjustment
programmes, the external debt, the neo-liberal agenda of the Nigerian state,
the frequent increases in fuel prices, the devaluation of the Naira, the
development blueprints such as NEEDS and other policy initiatives of the
regime. This position has been translated into different kinds of action-
strikes, demonstrations, education and even legal action.

Popular
Rights / People's Rights

The
NLC has been a significant contributor to the development and guarantee of
popular rights in Nigeria. These contributions have been marked in the struggle
against military rule, in the struggle for transparent, free and fair
elections, in the opposition to massive electoral frauds, in its role in
monitoring elections, contributing to the debate on the political future of the
country and in the struggle to remove patently corrupt public officers from
office. Notable examples in this series of struggles include the massive
education and sensitization of the Nigerian people throughout the period
through various publications and leaflets; the alliance forged between the NLC,
ASUU and NANS in 1984 to force the Buhari regime to respect fundamental human
rights; the general strike by NUPENG and PENGASSAN, affiliates of the NLC, over
the annulment of the 1993 general elections by Babangida; the NLC / Civil
society action of May 28 and 29, 2007 and again in June 2007 following the
massive electoral frauds that characterised the general elections and; the NLC
campaign that 'Etteh Must Go Now' in the last part of 2007. There is no doubt
that NLC's actions contributed to popular disenchantment with the Buhari regime
and its subsequent overthrow in August, 1985. There is also no doubt that NLC's
opposition facilitated the setting up of the Commission on Electoral Reforms by
the present government and the decision of Etteh to throw in the towel,
finally.

Workers'
Rights

As
a workers' organisation, it is understandable that the NLC has over the years
protected, defended and deepened workers' rights. These efforts have covered
not only the rights of workers in the work place but also their rights in the
larger society. Part of the strategies deployed by the NLC has included the
education of large numbers of its leadership. It has thus established Harmattan
and Rain Schools. The NLC has also picketed banks as was the case when it
mobilised its 28 affiliates and 37 state councils to picket First Bank in 2002.
This informs the contributions of the NLC to the formation of a labour party,
the struggle for workers to have the right to participate in politics and to be
represented in certain governance decision making structures.

Women's
Rights

The
Nigeria Labour Congress has played a vanguard role in the expansion of women's
rights in Nigeria. From the review of its own constitution to accommodate more
participation for women in the leadership of trade unions, the Nigeria Labour
Congress has sought to reduce the level of discrimination that women face in
the workplace and in the larger society.

Students'
rights

The
NLC has functioned through most of the period as the protector of the rights of
students. To protect these rights, the NLC has been prepared as happened, for
example, on June 1, 1986 to place the freedom and lives of members of its
leadership on the line.

REASON
GOVERNMENT ENGAGE IN LABOUR MATTER

WHAT ARE LABOR UNIONS?

Many people
think of labor unions as a kind of special interest group -- manual workers looking
out for their own narrow economic interests. Unions are portrayed as powerful organizations,
often corrupt, that at best benefit their members at the expense of nonmembers
and the society at large, and at worst really only serve the interests of union
bosses. Most people interpret the dramatic decline of unions as indicating that
Nigeria workers no longer want unions. Americans are individualistic, they
believe in individual competition and think that the best way to get ahead is
to do so on your own. If unions are no longer all that important, this is
because workers have abandoned unions.

Sociologists
like to use words like “spheres” or “domains” to describe different aspects of
society. Such spatial metaphors are always a bit misleading, since these
different aspects of social life intersect and overlap in all sorts of ways.

Many
professional economists share this basic view. The free market works best, they
argue, when there is no interference with purely voluntary exchanges. Unions
get in the way of individual workers voluntarily making bargains with
individual employers.

Unions create
rigidities in the market, rigidities in wage rates, rigidities in free choice, rigidities
in hiring decisions by employers, and all of this reduces efficiency and economic
performance. In the end, the story goes, everyone is worse off because unions muck
up the smooth functioning of the system.

We will offer an
alternative view of labor unions that stresses two main points: the first
concerns the effect of unions on the distribution of economic power in a
capitalist system; the second concerns the nature of political power and its
relation to collective association in a democracy.

Economic power

Workers are, as
individuals, are at an inherent disadvantage in bargaining with employers because
they have fewer options. Power, in a market, depends upon how many options each
party has, how badly harmed each party is they fail to make a deal. In most circumstances,
an employer has many potential employees that can be hired for most jobs.
Usually it hurts an employee more to be fired than it hurts an employer for an individual
employee to quit, and this means that employers have more power than workers. There
are a variety of ways of rectifying this imbalance of power in the labor
market. One way is for the government to impose regulations on labor contracts
which in one way or another reduce the ability of employers to dictate the
terms of an agreement. All developed capitalist countries have such rules.
Examples include minimum wage rules, health and safety rules, rules governing
overtime and working hours. The assumption behind all such rules is that left
to their own devices employers would offer jobs at below the minimum wage, with
unsafe working conditions, and with excessive working hours, and because of
their vulnerability, there would be workers willing to accept such jobs. The
rules are therefore designed to block employers from using their power
advantage in labor markets to employ workers under the excluded conditions. Unions
are the second main way for rectifying the imbalance of power by creating some
semblance of equality in bargaining over the employment contract. Where Unions are
strong, employers must come to a collective agreement with workers (through the
union) otherwise the employer will not have access to a labor force. This means
that workers have a capacity to punish employers for failing to agree to a
satisfactory contract by collectively refusing to work. This is called a
strike. While an individual worker refusing to work generally does little harm
to an employer, a collective refusal matters.

The threat of
that collective refusal, then, constitutes a new background condition for labor
market bargaining. The results are contractual terms that are more favorable to
workers.

This narrow
economic benefit of unions for workers is called the wage-premium for unionized
workers indicates the magnitude of this premium for some selected low-wage
jobs. In each of these cases, unionized workers received over a third higher wages
than their nonunionized counterparts.

Political power

Most discussions
of unions focus only on the issue of economic power and the impact of unions on
the labor market. While this is undoubtedly the main motivation for most people
in joining a union, it is by no means the only important role that unions play
in society. In particular, unions have the potential to help forge more
democratically engaged citizens. Isolated, atomized, individual citizens are
likely to be a passive, apathetic political force. The problem of rational
ignorance makes people easy to manipulate and discourages participation, and in
the absence of strong solidarities, a sense of civic obligation is unlikely to
flourish. The labor movement is one of the important ways that individuals can
feel connected to each other in ways that makes political activity seem
relevant.

Labor unions
foster democratic participation in two ways. First, unions contribute to what
can be called organic solidarities. Unions are organizations that are
embedded in one important setting in many people’s lives – their workplaces. In
countries with a vibrant labor movement, unions in the workplace organize all
sorts of activities and help ordinary workers get involved in many collective
decisions within work. In many European countries there are workplace councils
in which workers, through their unions, are involved in health and safety
regulations, monitoring working conditions, grievance procedures, and many
other things. When conflicts occur with management, individual workers are more
likely to experience these as collective struggles rather than simply individual
complaints. Through these activities, the interdependencies that exist within work
can become solidarities, and these solidarities can facilitate greater
involvement in broader democratic politics.

A strong union
movement does more than give people the kind of life experiences than affects
their identities and builds a sense of connectedness and solidarity. It also solves
crucial organizational problems. Unions provide information to their members helping
to mitigate the problem of rational ignorance around political issues, and they
lower significantly the individual costs of active participation. Unions typically
become, as organizations, directly involved in political parties. In electoral
campaigns this helps parties solve a crucial problem – mobilizing people for
electoral campaigning, both as voters and as volunteer campaign workers. A
strong union movement can help provide the volunteer legwork for practical
electoral activities and in this way counteract the influence of money in
campaigns. This is an important reason why, where unions are strong, voter
participation rates are higher and public policies tend to serve the wider interests
of ordinary citizens rather than just elites.

Unions are
certainly not the only kind of voluntary association that can play this role of
building solidarities and facilitating democratic political participation. They
do, however, have two big advantages over many other potential associations.
First, they are closely tied to workplaces in which workers already have some
solidarity through their interdependencies within work. Workplaces are
themselves a cooperative community of interacting persons, and this provides a
social basis for building deeper solidarities through conscious organization.
Second, unions have the potential to be a mass movement – called “the labor
movement” – since in contemporary capitalism the vast majority of adults work
for a living as employees, and most of these employees have no managerial
authority within work. The labor movement has the potential to build broad and
inclusive solidarities.